The woman is still recognizable, but just barely. The pale white complexion of her face and forehead is clear and intact as is her uncharacteristically short, slightly disheveled brown hair. She’s dressed in a Victorian-style formal high-necked gown, but in the photograph the dress looks full-on psychedelicized. One side of the woman’s head is disintegrating right before our eyes.

The whole scene looks like a pixelated digital effect created for low-rent science fiction, but this one’s falling apart the old-fashioned way. A hundred years of living outside in harsh Pennsylvania winters with toxic heavy industry air have started to corrode and dismantle this relic. That fact is both tragic—if you wish to see the woman’s image preserved—and beautiful in the haphazard way the photograph is dissolving. She’s not alone.

It was just about seven years ago to the day when The Orbit first tripped across the early-last-century ceramic photo insets at Loretto Cemetery. It was our first exposure to the phenomena and entrée to the fever. Along with the majorly disproportionate number of these at the little cemetery in Arlington Heights—and the near complete absence of them at much larger cemeteries—the experience totally flipped our collective wig.

Since that time, every trip to the boneyard comes with some amount of spying for these “posthumous portraits” both as historical record and the fascinating aesthetic of the completely random ways they weather and age. We dug deep. Not just at Loretto, but also Workmen’s Circle Branch 45 and Beaver Cemetery, where pre-war photo graves are similarly in great supply.

Nothing, though, had us prepared for the overwhelming volume of portraits available at Economy Cemetery in Harmony Township, just outside of Ambridge. The number was so great, the occurrence so common, that we abandoned any hope of a true cataloging of the form and stuck to the wild ones—the ghosts, disappearing acts, invisible figures, full blown possession.

There were plenty in just this minority of the total number that we’re splitting the subject into a two-parter. This week, the apparitions; next time, the crook’d and crack’d.

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A note on the photos: You’ll notice there are no attributions to the people photographed as we’ve tried to do in the past. That’s in part because there are just so many to deal with and the task quickly became untenable. More than that, though, at least a third of the photos are from grave markers where the text is no longer legible and probably another third are in a variety of non-Roman alphabets—Greek, Cyrillic—that your author wouldn’t know how to represent accurately.